How to chop people from photos using Adobe Photoshop?

Question

I'd like to use a photo of myself for an internet profile page. The photo I have chosen has 2 other people in, I'd like to chop them out. So far I have tried selecting them and pressing delete, this has taken them out of the picture. However, I am left with white parts of the photo and when I try and load it on my profile page these white bits show up. So I'd like to know how to cut them out but make the part of the photo that shows me into a new photo. So when I load it as my profile photo it will just show the photo of me, no white sections.

Answer 1

It would be best to make them turn into the background and leave your picture the way it is. Use the stamp tool in Photoshop. Hold alt down and select an area near the person you want to delete to select an area, then click on their face. It will turn into what you've selected. You can align it or use the same area over and over and stamp out the faces you don't want. Be creative and you can make it look like they were never in the picture in the first place.

I use the stamp tool a lot. It's incredible once you get the hang of it.

Answer 2

What you need to do is to isolate yourself from the photo.

You use the pen tool for that to draw a Bezier curve outline. That's the simplest way to do it but you need to know how to use the pen tool and get good with it. Once you've traced the outline, you selected it, feather (anti-alias) the edges, cut, and paste it into a new picture.

A more complex way to do it is with the magic wand, alpha channels, filter channels, contrast adjustment, and the pixel eraser tools. This makes a white mask of your outline in an alpha channel (transparency channel) which, when inverted, will mask everything except the outline of yourself. This way is more accurate because you can get the individual hairs on your head with the pixel eraser tool.

Pretty hard to explain, it's much easier to show. But basically you work with masks and selections. The pen tool for selecting things is one of the handiest tools in Photoshop.

P.S. You can go to a used book store and pick up a Photoshop manual for a few dollars. There's a lot to learn.

Answer 3

You need to make them transparent.
To do this Open your image and use the selection tool of your choice, make a rough selection of the person you want to "ghost" For example 2 people in a pic, you want to make one disapear. Don`t worry about making a really accurate selaction, just get fairly close to the edges.
Press Command -J (PC;Control-J) to uplicate the seletion pixels on a seperate layer.

On the background layer you want to cover up the other person like they were never there Click on the eye icon beside layer 1 to hide it.
then click on the background layer to make it active.
now select the area close to where the person was=reference lines.
Choose the move tool 9V) , hold down the option key(pc:alt key) to start to drag the selectionOVER the person. TO HIDE IT.

keep doing this

choose option drag (pc- Alt-drag) lining them up with the reference point. to hide rest of the person

Answer 4

In the same way you selected the other two to cut them you can also select yourself and copy to a different background.